Sonobeat Artists
Bill Miller Group (Cold Sun)
Esoteric, bizarre, and... compelling
Bill Miller’s electric autoharp, that he openly acknowledged was an analog to The 13th Floor Elevators’ amplified jug, made a significant contribution to the distinctive sound of the group’s album Cold Sun. But capturing the unique sound of an electric autoharp was challenging, and, after trying and discarding several microphone techniques, Bill Sr. simply plugged the autoharp’s pickups directly into Sonobeat’s custom 16-channel mixing console, a common studio technique now known as “direct injection”. Adding to the challenge was Bill Miller’s use of multiple playing styles – strumming, plucking, slapping... whatever created a weird or otherworldly sound.
In addition to Miller, Sonobeat’s archives list the following artists on the Cold Sun sessions: Tom McGarrigle, Hugh Patton, and Mike Waugh. The versatile Waugh previously played bass on Jim Chesnut’s country-pop 45 RPM stereo single for Sonobeat and on Bill Wilson’s song demo album and Herman Nelson’s second song demo album, both recorded for Sonobeat’s sister company, Sonosong Music. All songs on the Cold Sun album were written by Bill Miller, except Fall, co-written by Miller and Winston Taylor, and the album’s epic finale, Ra-Ma, based in part on Egyptian mythology, written by Miller and McGarrigle with melody and lyric contributions by prolific Sonosong composer Herman Nelson, himself deeply interested in metaphysics and the occult.
Visionary lyricist and electric autoharp wielder supreme Billy Miller recorded these three astonishing songs [Fall, Here in the Year, and Ram-Ma] with his quartet Cold Sun a/k/a Dark Shadows, in Texas’ legendary Sonobeat Studios, creating a startlingly rich-but-ragged heathen-as-f&#% post-psychedelic sound that many believe was way ahead of its time.”
A long road to the Cold Sun album
The Cold Sun album was recorded over a five month period, starting in November 1970 and finishing in March 1971 at Sonobeat’s Western Hills Drive studio in northwest Austin. Final mixes, including some re-recordings and vocal overdubs, took place at Sonobeat’s then-new North Lamar studio in Austin in July 1971. There are confusing titles on the various master tape boxes in the Sonobeat archives, possibly indicating early titles of songs that changed as the album matured – titles like Marble, Mind Aura, Light, What Season, Cycle, and Silent. These titles (except for Marble) don’t appear as part of producer Bill Josey Sr.’s final remixes on July 29, 1971, and Marble was removed from the album’s final track sequencing less than a month later.
...one of the most important and revered psychedelic underground albums from the early 70s. Killer heavy psych masterpiece featuring amazing guitar and autoharp playing that will blow your mind.”
Bill Miller Group (Cold Sun)
- Tom McGarrigle (electric guitar, bass, and vocals)
- Bill Miller (electric autoharp, harmonica, slide guitar, electric guitar, and vocals)
- Hugh Patton (drums and percussion)
- Mike Waugh (bass, electric guitar, and vocals)
In a shift from his customary practice, Bill Sr. didn’t have vinyl test pressings of the Cold Sun album manufactured, instead opting to circulate inexpensive audiocassette dubs to his contacts at the major record companies, hoping to license the masters for a national release. But there were no takers for the esoteric, often bizarre recordings. Although Sonobeat never released the album, Bill Sr. contemplated releasing a stereo single featuring See What You Cause and Twisted Flower, but he eventually abandoned those plans for reasons not documented in the Sonobeat archives. Although dubs of the master tapes have circulated for over 50 years, the album was not publicly released until 1989 when specialty label Rockadelic issued a limited vinyl edition of 300 copies under the artist name Cold Sun and album title Dark Shadows, a title Miller selected as homage to the 1960s cult goth TV series. The Rockadelic and subsequent releases, including a digital version sold by Amazon, are not Sonobeat-sanctioned releases and regardless how advertised are not mastered from Sonobeat’s original session tapes or first generation mix-downs but most likely from an audiocassette dub.
Cold Sun is an anomaly in Texas psych history. As significant as Bubble Puppy or Moving Sidewalks but in no way similar, the Austin quartet cut one cult classic in its brief existence, the spell-binding Dark Shadows, which Jello Biafra called ‘the best psychedelic album I know of.’ Dark Shadows is crude and cryptic, the type of record that makes you feel like you can crawl inside of it and hide for awhile.”
Miller moved on from Cold Sun to perform, along with McGarrigle, with Roky Erickson in Roky’s post-13th Floor Elevators band Bliebalien and, later, The Aliens. Assuming the stage name Billy Angel, Miller later moved to Marin County, California, and joined the Santa Fe, New Mexico-based punk rock band The Blood Drained Cows, flying around the country wherever the band performed. On May 1, 2011, 39 years after breaking up, Miller, McGarrigle, and Waugh reunited as Cold Sun to perform one last gig at the Austin Psych Fest (an annual event in Austin that has since been renamed Levitation), joined by The Blood Drained Cows’ drummer Tom Trusnovic. On October 19, 2012, It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine’s Klemen Breznikar interviewed Bill Miller to dig deeper into the Cold Sun experiment that led to Miller’s collaboration with Roky Erickson. Tom McGarrigle died in hospice on August 24, 2021.
Dark Shadows is the fearless creation of a unique foursome of peyote-fueled Texan heads, so obsessed with making music that they believed they could change everything. In that sense, it is a tragic, even desperate failure, but I’d recommend you give it a moment: it will seek out your soul and suck you in with its deranged beauty.”
Recording details
Unreleased recordings
- Fall* (Bill Miller-Winston Taylor) • 7:06
- For Ever* • 4:22
- Here in the Year* • 8:48
- History Ends
- Light
- Marble
- Mind Aura
- Number 1
- Ra-Ma* (Bill Miller-Tom McGarrigle-Herman Nelson) • 11:09
- See What You Cause* • 3:36
- Silent
- South Texas* • 5:15
- To Her
- Twisted Flower* • 2:59
- What Season
All songs composed by Bill Miller except as otherwise indicated
* indicates tracks selected for an unreleased album tentatively entitled Cold Sun; although various takes of the same song have different running times, the running times indicated above are of the final mixes
Produced and engineered by Bill Josey Sr.
Recorded at Sonobeat’s Western Hills Drive studio, Austin, Texas, on November 17-18, 1970, December 9, 1970, and March 27, 1971, and at Sonobeat’s North Lamar studio, Austin, Texas, in July and August 1971
Recorded using...
- AKG D707E dynamic, ElectroVoice 665 dynamic, ElectroVoice Slimair 636 dynamic, and Sony ECM-22 electret condenser microphones
- Scully 280 half-inch 4-track, Stemco 500-4 half-inch-4-track, and Ampex AG-350 quarter-inch 2-track tape decks
- Custom 16-channel 4-bus mixing console
- Fairchild Lumiten 663ST stereo optical compressor
- Blonder-Tongue Audio Baton 9-band graphic equalizer
- Custom steel plate stereo reverb
- 3M (Scotch) 202 and Ampex 681 tape stock
It’s a strange and darkly poetic record, with freak-out lyrics and vocals from Miller (which he claims predicted some future events and trends in their sci-fi explorations). Dark Shadows has a creepy, folksy sound made all the more psychedelic by the electrified autoharp. Austin, Texas, was one hell of a place to be when psychedelic music exploded in the Sixties, and Dark Shadows proves it further.”
Listen!
Coincidence?
Was Sonobeat co-founder and Cold Sun producer Bill Josey Sr. strongly superstitious? Bill Miller thought so. In an interview on now-defunct Lysergia.com, Miller stated “Josey ... believed that the Johnny Winter album’s exact track length was a lucky number. It was 43 or 45 minutes and – oh, I forget how many seconds. You can check the Johnny Winter length – you will find that it is exactly the same length as the Cold Sun album – exactly, to the second.” Miller was referring to Johnny Winter’s The Progressive Blues Experiment that Sonobeat recorded in 1968 and sold to Liberty Records for national release on Liberty’s Imperial label. Bill Sr. certainly hoped to sell Cold Sun to a national label, too. Sonobeat’s “white jacket” advance release of The Progressive Blues Experiment has a total running time of 43:15, although the Imperial version has a total running time of 42:54 because Imperial used shorter gaps between songs. The final version of the Cold Sun album that Bill Sr. assembled has a total running time of... 43:15!